Inviting District Leaders to Help Inform Emerging Research on ESSER Spending
Since the Office of K-12 Outreach was awarded a Michigan Applied Public Policy Research (MAPPR) grant from the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research (IPPSR) at Michigan State University last August, the team has been hard at work exploring how Michigan K-12 districts utilized their Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds and approached the September 2024 expiration of these resources. As part of this initiative, the researchers affiliated with this project launched a survey in November. If you are a superintendent or a similarly-positioned K-12 district administrator in Michigan, we want to hear from you about your experience with ESSER funds! Your response could contribute to future education policy and school funding decisions in Michigan.
Importantly, our survey is only open until Sunday, December 15th, at 11:59 PM. As a thank you to survey participants, eligible respondents can enter their name and district email address in a raffle to win one of six fifty-dollar digital gift cards. Individuals who are interested in the survey can access it through a few means. First, if they are their district’s contact person in the Educational Entity Master (EEM), they can check their listed email for a message titled “Requesting Your Input on ESSER Funds!” from the Office of K-12 Outreach (k12out@msu.edu) on Monday, November 18th. Second, they can review the Michigan Association of Superintendents & Administrators (MASA) Monday Memo from Monday, November 18th. Finally, they can contact any of the project leads for the survey link – Dr. Bryan Beverly (beverlyb@msu.edu), Dr. Jacqueline Gardner (swans126@msu.edu), or Tyler Thur (thurtyle@msu.edu).
Down the road, the K-12 Outreach research team will supplement the insights shared via this survey with follow-up interviews with a collection of district leaders. After that, they will publish a policy brief summarizing their research findings to be shared with local, state, and federal policymakers. Already, the research team has some extraordinarily helpful survey feedback from participating superintendents and administrators, and they are excited to learn more over the next few weeks!